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We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us but we can't accept it for what it is.

Stanislaw Lem

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Stanislaw Lem
Age: 84 †
Born: 1921
Born: September 12
Died: 2006
Died: March 27
Essayist
Futurist
Philosopher
Physician
Playwright
Poet
Researcher
Satirist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Lemberg
Austria
Stanislaw Lem
Lem
Stanislav Lem
Stanislas Lem
Mirrors
Accept
Accepting
Single
Need
Needs
Solaris
World
Suffices
Worlds

More quotes by Stanislaw Lem

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For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world.
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Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.
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I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.
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This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past.
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Science is turning into a monastery for the Order of Capitulant Friars. Logical calculus is supposed to supersede man as moralist. We submit to the blackmail of the 'superior knowledge' that has the temerity to assert that nuclear war can be, by derivation, a good thing, because this follows from simple arithmetic.
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I don't resist progress, but I have a growing feeling that mankind uses it mostly for disgraceful purposes.
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Nothing, my dear and clever colleague, is not your run-of-the-mill nothing, the result of idleness and inactivity, but dynamic, aggressive Nothingness, that is to say, perfect, unique, ubiquitous, in other words Nonexistence, ultimate and supreme.
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I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.
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The demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.
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A smart machine will first consider which is more worth its while: to perform the given task or, instead, to figure some way out of it.
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No one reads if someone does read, he doesn't understand if he understands, he immediately forgets.
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Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
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I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.
Stanislaw Lem
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Skepticism is like a microscope whose magnification is constantly increased: the sharp image that one begins with finally dissolves, because it is not possible to see ultimate things: their existence is only to be inferred.
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The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.
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We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.
Stanislaw Lem
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Our ability to adapt and therefore to accept everything is one of our greatest dangers. Creatures that are completely flexible, changeable, can have no fixed morality.
Stanislaw Lem
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If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
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To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.
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Either something is authentic or it is unauthentic, it is either false or true, make-believe or spontaneous life yet here we are faced with a prevaricated truth and an authentic fake, hence a thing that is at once the truth and a lie.
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